ON THE ROCKS: Skips teaming up leads to early success on curling tour

Kerri Einarson is finding success with her new curling team, as all four members have previous experience as skips.Sean Kilpatrick / The Canadian Press / Files

Whoever believes in the old expression “too many chefs spoil the soup” clearly has not seen the first few weeks of the Canadian curling season.

The hottest teams in the country right now in both the men’s and women’s divisions are ones that formed at the end of last season with more than one skip in the lineup.

Well, technically, there’s only one skip on each team now, but two members of the Reid Carruthers team out of Winnipeg were high-level skips last season and all four members of the Kerri Einarson team out of Gimli, Man., were calling games just last winter.

Carruthers teamed up with longtime friend and rival Mike McEwen — who skipped a team to the Olympic trials final last December — while Einarson added Edmonton’s Val Sweeting as her third, and Winnipeg skips Shannon Birchard and Briane Meilleur as second and lead.

The early results have been impressive for both teams.

Carruthers, with McEwen throwing fourth stones, won the StuSells Toronto Tankard over the Thanksgiving Weekend — beating Stuart Thompson of Dartmouth, N.S., in the final — just a week after losing the final of the Grand Slam’s Elite 10 in Chatham, Ont., to two-time defending Brier champion Brad Gushue.

Einarson won the Autumn Gold Curling Classic in Calgary, defeating world champion Jennifer Jones in the final and knocking off Olympian Rachel Homan in the semifinal. It was the fourth win of the season already for the Einarson team, through six events.

“Things sure have come together very quickly for us,” said Einarson, who made it to the final of the national Scotties with a different team last winter. “We didn’t think we’d have this much success so early. But it’s nice to get off to a really great start.”

The Einarson foursome was clearly put together to compete with Jones and Homan at the top of the Canadian women’s curling hierarchy and it features an abundance of talent. As a skip, Sweeting represented Alberta at the national Tournament of Hearts three times, losing the final twice, in 2014 and 2015, and competed in the 2013 and 2017 Olympic trials.

Birchard was an up-and-coming skip who played third for Jones (replacing Kaitlyn Lawes) as she won the 2018 Scotties in Penticton. She was the fifth player for Jones when she won the world championship in North Bay, Ont.

Meilleur skipped a team in the pre-trials event in 2017, but has dropped down to play lead, a big adjustment for any curler.

“In our off-season, we all got together quite a few times throughout the summer,” Einarson said of the team dynamic. “We played baseball together, we camped out on our coach’s property and we just spent a few team weekends getting to know each other. I think that was really key.

“These three girls are really hard working and determined ladies that really want to strive at their new positions.”

Manitoba skip Reid Carruthers directs the sweep as they play Quebec at the Tim Hortons Brier curling championship at the Brandt Centre in Regina on March 5, 2018.Andrew Vaughan /
The Canadian Press / Files

The Carruthers-McEwen combination is a little different. The two have been best friends for years but also went head-to-head numerous times in competition for provincial, national and World Curling Tour titles.

They decided to give teaming up a try, with Carruthers calling the game and McEwen throwing fourth stones on a team that also included second Derek Samagalski and lead Colin Hodgson.

So far, so good.

“I would say it’s a bit unexpected,” McEwen said. “That’s probably a little bit of gravy having that kind of early success. We didn’t play our best but we were grinders. I was impressed with how gritty the team was early on this year. We’ve got lots to work on, by all means. Just because we went to two finals in a row doesn’t necessarily mean we’re clicking on all cylinders.”

The biggest adjustment for McEwen and Carruthers is in the game-calling. Both men have a ton of experience and occasionally differences of opinion. The new dynamic will take some time to get used to.

“It’s good but it’s not without its challenges,” McEwen said. “It’s still trying to figure out how to balance both of us having responsibilities of leading the team and skipping the team. It’s not just one guy calling all the shots. At some point during the end, it does get handed off to me. That blended approach is definitely not as smooth as we would hope yet.”

McEwen skipped a high-level team for 11 years, making Brier appearances and having all kinds of success on the world tour, before joining Carruthers. The last time he had to sweep intensely was in 2004, when he played third for Winnipeg’s James Kirkness.

That part has been a big adjustment as well.

“It’s harder,” McEwen laughed.

“It’s just a huge learning curve on everything that I haven’t had to do for a decade. I definitely had to get my butt in gear. Training was more intense, with not only a lot of strength building but cardio and endurance mixed in there. I wasn’t really sure what to expect when I stepped on the ice.”

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